Jury selection begins in capital murder trial

WEST CHESTER — A total of five jurors — three women and two men — were chosen Tuesday in the capital murder trial of a Philadelphia man accused of gunning down a Coatesville barber shop owner as part of an alleged murder for hire.

Judge David Bortner, overseeing the trial of Eric “Stroda” Coxry, excused the majority of prospective jurors who were questioned one-on-one for cause, believing their attitudes toward the death penalty would not permit them to serve on the panel of 12 jurors and four alternates.

But attorneys for the prosecution and the defense also used their peremptory challenges to keep people they did not want on the panel. Each side has 20 such “strikes” for the 12 jurors and one each for the four alternates.

The painstaking process of selecting the jury will begin again Wednesday.

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Coxry, 35, is accused of being the gunman who shot and killed Coatesville’s Jonas “Sonny” Suber the morning of Oct. 21, 2006, as Suber opened the front door of his home on Walnut Street to see who was knocking. Two women – Suber’s wife, who was home at the time of the shooting and was an eyewitness to the murder, and a Coatesville mother out walking with her children that morning – later identified him as the culprit.

Authorities contend that Suber was killed on the orders of Coatesville crime figure Duron “Gotti” People in retaliation for a “beef” the two had with one another over Suber’s dalliance with Peoples’ then-girlfriend. It was the culmination of several shootings and episodes of violence that began in early 2006.

Peoples and his associate, Shamone “Kadoff” Woods, who allegedly enlisted Coxry to carry out the shooting, are currently serving jail sentences for other unrelated shootings.

Jurors on death penalty cases in Pennsylvania are excused from service for cause if they express opposition to the death penalty that could not be overcome by a judge’s instructions to follow the law in determining whether a defendant convicted of first-degree murder should be sentenced to death or life in prison without parole.

For example, a man who was identified as Juror No. 1 said that as a Catholic, he did not believe it was right to condemn another person to death, even for the crime of murder. “I don’t feel comfortable with it, even though the person took someone else’s life,” he told Bortner under questioning.

Even so, lead defense attorney Brenda Jones asked Bortner to leave the man in the jury pool. Defense strategy is, in general, to seat people who have a moral or ethical hesitation when it comes to the ultimate penalty on a panel even in the face of their spoken opposition. It takes only a single vote for life in prison to defeat the death penalty.

In another instance Tuesday, a middle-aged woman with salt-and-pepper grey hair initially said that she would be against the death penalty. However, little by little under questioning from Bortner and the attorneys the woman acknowledged that she would be able to weigh the various factors for and against the death penalty as described by Bortner in his legal instructions and possibly vote for a death sentence.

That woman, juror No. 12, was excused after Assistant District Attorney Brian Burack, who is co-counsel with Deputy District Attorney Ronald Yen in the case, told Bortner the prosecution would use one of its strike to keep her from serving.

A Pomeroy man who said he had been a commercial truck driver for more than 30 years was similarly kept off the panel by the defense even tough he said he could weigh the pros and cons of the death penalty. The man, who wore a pony tail and sported a goatee beard, had written on the questionnaire jurors were given that he thought that a life sentence was “a joke” and that he was “all for” the death penalty, depending on the crime.

The judge also used his own discretion to dismiss a number of potential jurors who told him of hardships that would make their service on the jury problematic. Included were a dentist who would have had to reschedule as many as 250 appointments over the possible three weeks of the trial; a businessman who had plane tickets to a vacation in Spain for him and his family; and a woman who said she was set to continued job training at Vanguard Industries.